On Sonnetizing

one pillbug is not like the other pillbug

While we all await the imminent if seemingly dilatory collapse of WestCiv_®, as if to ward it off by the intensity of our distractedness, i’m seeing a lot of sonnets on Substack. Perhaps it is after all no more than, in this part of the country, picking up a brick to find pillbugs underneath. As a person who has committed more than my lifetime allotment of sonnets, i have feelings about them. Mainly, i don’t want to read any more.

Not even in the service of a Return to Form (which might mutate into--more to the point--a resumption of auditory value in poemwriting) do i wish to see people rhyming fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, in whatever rhyme scheme, ending on that snap of the fingers a good sonnet is supposed to evince.

Now, you may say that this is all a result of misguided hordes rushing into the assembly line without having first read more than the bare instructions. If they had a serious acquaintance with the poetic tradition, they would realize (as i in time realized) the Sonnet is just about the last shape standing, out of a whole ecosystem of short forms, few of which ever received the dignity of a name, & all of them just as useful & deserving of replication, but without the glamor.

The difference is, when you write a poem of three quatrains, you don’t have nearly as many expectations about what it’s going to sound like, as you do with a sonnet... I say, write a treizain (13-line poem) rather than a quatorzain (14-line poem), because there’s a lot fewer of those! But really, the problem with knowing in advance when you are going to end, is not like hitting a target. It’s that, when what you have to say runs out before that 14th line, you’re going to pad; & if the 140th syllable comes sooner, you’re going to crush it into an ending that’s unnatural. My advice is to work on a smaller scale: 2 or 3 or 4 lines to complete a section. If you run out of something to say in a section, it’s a lot easier to scrap it than scrapping a whole poem.

My other gripes are with resusicating Rhyme, & with the elder-abuse that 21c poets writing in Iambic Pentameter are prone to. If you want to be a Rhyming Poet (which to me is like someone who wants to be a Pilot, picturing themselves with goggles & a skullcap climbing onto the wing of a Sopwith Camel--yay, loop-the-loop ambitions!), you should know two things. One, all the rhymes in Italian came to Dante in a dream & asked to be included in his great work.

And, two, in 1936 Clement Wood published a Rhyming Dictionary, which you should look at. If you’ve been reading any verse at all, the first thing you will understand is that most of the rhymes in English (which is said to be a “rhyme-poor” language) have never been used by anyone. Instead, there’s about a hundred that the tradition has sanctified as being decently-literary, & a hundred more that are acceptable under duress. I wish to stipulate that you never use a rhyme that has been used before, unless you use it with a new meaning. (Like that’s going to happen...)

Or open your mind to the idea that what’s at stake is not the religious joining of two words under a conventional marriage-yoke of interchangeable sound, but the fact of linkage. (One could write a whole book on the possible varieties, but not me.) I happen to think that alliteration has a value in particular for these times, because its era is so long passed that there are not even cliché-shadows to trouble us anymore.

Elsewhere i not-entirely-unseriously proposed “rhime” or number-rhyming according to English gematria (A=1, B=2...Z=26). Likewise early in the 20c “criss-cross” was invented--though nobody but Auden paid any attention: like a regular rhyme, except you switch the vowel-sounds of the two words…

“That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning’s levelled gun...”

(He’s using the initial consonants also, which are not a requirement of Cross-cross, but make it harder.) I think Criss-cross or Alliteration could give formal verse another hundred years, easily--all other enemies of Poetry (silicon-based or otherwise) notwithstanding.

Finally, there’s Iambic Pentameter. I want to tell you that writing good iambic pentameter is like the work required to become an Olympic-level gymnast. But you wouldn’t believe me. Almost all the so-called pentameter of the last 80 or 90 years has been prose that happens to have a rhyme-word at every tenth syllable. Why is that? English was well becoming a non-iambic language by the end of the 19th century. That’s why Vers Libre became the default. Late Victorians struggled to give their lines five beats, it’s true. The bulk of them have four. Some have only three. Read them out loud without singsong. You’ll see.

It’s possible if you read nothing but poems published before 1900 (or better, 1880) you could develop an ear for pentameter in the language of that time. But those poets did exactly that, & more often than not, failed to.

Songwriters continued to develop the craft of writing verse, even after poets had ceased to know or care, & what they discovered about syncopation & duple-time are worth another essay (not this one). There are even good songs in five-beat measures. But they long ago realized that four-beat lines (& shorter) are better for saying everything they needed to say; & you should, too.

Having said all this, i urge you to read the sonnets of Edna St Vincent Millay, who was the last poet to have used that form with anything like the old authority.